time machine won't start

Time machine is pointing to an external 2TB Seagate USB drive with 1TB partitioned for TM backups. Time machine appears to backup correctly, going through the motions. I look at the time stamp on the sparse bundle and it is in sync with the backups occuring.

When I select "Enter Time Machine" from the menu bar icon nothing happens. Time machine doesn't launch, I don't see a process kick off in Activity Monitor or if I run top in a terminal window.

I would remove the app to see if that fixes the problem but I'm not sure how to restore it if I do.

I've done the Time Machine 'reset' procedure on the Pondini site (thanks) along with running Disk Util to repair the backup disk.

I'm a little stumped on this one. I really hate the idea of completely re-installing Lion.

I figured out what the problem was. When I started using the drive as a Time Machine backup, I just plugged it in without taking a look at the partioning other than size. What I had was a couple of partitions that were both formatted as MSDOS and not with GUID. Although Time Machine will happily write to a MSDOS partitition, it doesn't seem to want to use it when you try and launch time machine.

I had done a couple of successful repairs with no errors so I ruled that out.

I repartitioned the drive, let Time Machine do a backup to the new GUID journaled FS and it worked straight away. I'm sure there is an Apple manual that says make sure you're drive is GUID journaled but I didn't put 2 and 2 together.

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